This research aims to find out why Graphic Designers change their roles, what it means for the transformation of the whole field, and how the skills of Graphic Designers are utilized in the new roles. The main data for the thesis will consist of five interviews conducted with five Graphic Designers who have all changed professions regardless of the good working situation in the field.

I will examine the transformation in the field of Graphic Design from the viewpoint of sociology’s profession theory. In this theory profession is socially constructed. As my main theory, I will use Andrew Abbotts work: The System of Professions: An Essay on Division of Expert Labor. To understand profession one must examine their jurisdictions and how their tasks are grouped. Professions compete against each other over jurisdiction on doing certain tasks. Graphic Design has done well in the competition between professions in the last hundred years. The tasks of Graphic Designers have increased in each decade. However Graphic Design, or design in general, has not been able to become a part of public discourse and its institutions are weak. Taking ownership on constantly evolving digital communication forms is a challenging task for the profession of Graphic Design.

There were five themes that rose from the interview data, from which three are subjective, stemming from personal experience and constructed in social reality. These are expectations about working life, the planning process and the relevance of the work. In these, the interviewees values and the values projections to work is examined and also the expectations and meanings toward working life. The other two themes, digitalization and the application of Graphic Designers skills are more practical questions and depict the change of working practices.

The conclusions are that at the same time as the status of media houses as the controllers of communications has vanished, the control has also vanished from the Graphic Designers. Graphic Designers feel frustrated in the typical role of product and communications design maybe because communication and interaction happens on digital platforms somewhere else. The interest of the Graphic Designer was always in communications, not in surface design. In the future, Graphic Design, or Visual Communication Design will become platformed. Designers will build more and more systems, not individual products. With this trend, there lives a line of thought which produces unique artefacts.